The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding. - John Updike

An affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.

She breathed that air he'd forgotten, of high-school loveliness, come uninvited to bloom in the shadow of railroad overpasses, alongside telephone poles, within earshot of highways with battered aluminum center strips, out of mothers gone to lard and fathers ground down by gray days of work and more work, in an America littered with bottlecaps and pull-tabs and pieces of broken muffler.

It's been the same story ever since I can remember, ever since Wilson – the Republicans don't do a thing for the little man.